Abstract

A fundamental problem in the design of optical communication systems is to minimize channel outages due to the polarization effects. System designers commonly allocate a prescribed margin to polarization effects, such as 2 dB, with a certain probability that the margin will be exceeded, such as 10^–6. When this margin is exceeded an outage is said to occur. Because outages are so rare, it has been difficult to obtain them from experiments or from standard Monte Carlo simulations.

© 2002 Optical Society of America